Spotting broken hearts by monitoring troponin

In February, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) advises Americans to ‘get heart smart’, protect #OurHearts, and face The Heart Truth^®. This is not some anti-Valentine’s Day push from a global leader in medical research, but part of the NIH’s education plan for American Heart Month. In the US, heart disease is the leading cause of death. Rather than a single condition, heart disease includes several cardiac maladies that may be silently lurking and undiagnosed until ailments like an arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat) or a myocardial infarction (heart attack) manifests. Each year, symptoms pointing to a myocardial infarction bring about 20 million patients to emergency departments in North America and Europe.

Rather than unique red flags, myocardial infarction symptoms – including weakness, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, shortness of breath, and chest pain – are also hallmarks of ‘noncardiac and often benign disorders’. It is far easier to spot a broken heart in the colloquial sense than in a clinical one.